Feeling Loved: A Novel Self-Report Health Measure

The “Feeling Loved” self-report questionnaire instrument (PDF) assesses the feelings of being loved, and of loving oneself. This four item questionnaire consists of two Yes/No questions (Do you feel loved? Do you love yourself?) along with two corresponding visual analogue scales (VAS): “How loved do you feel?” and “How much do you love yourself?” These are scored by the respondent making a mark on the corresponding 100mm VAS, which is labelled by “Not at All” at one end, and “Very, very much” at the other.

Please register your intended use of the “Feeling Loved” self-report questionnaire instrument.

The Feeling Loved self-report instrument was finalized in March of 2012, for use in a four year randomized controlled trial. The Meditation or Exercise for Preventing Acute Respiratory Infection (MEPARI-2) trial enrolled four yearly cohorts of approximately 100 participants per year from 2012 through 2015. Baseline assessment and randomization occurred each August. Participants were randomly assigned to eight weeks of training in mindfulness or exercise, or to an observational control group. Trainings were done in September and October. All participants were followed from study entry in August through May of the following year. The Feeling Loved instrument was filled out by participants at baseline, before randomization, and then again three more times during the Wisconsin cold and flu season. Incidence, duration, severity and impact of all-cause acute respiratory infection were the primary outcomes. MEPARI-2 was sponsored by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (grant #R01AT006970) and was registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT01654289).

When designing Feeling Loved, our intent was to create a simple and straightforward questionnaire that could be used by virtually any literate English-speaking person. We did not pre-suppose what “feel loved” or “love yourself” meant to people, and did not specify who or what it was that people might be felt loved by. If a participant asked for additional information about Feeling Loved (or any of more than a dozen other questionnaires), we simply said that they must decide what it meant to them, and to score the questionnaire in the most honest and correct way they could. There were very few questions; almost everyone seemed to understand and respond easily to the Feeling Loved questionnaire. Less than 1% of participants failed to fill out the Feeling Loved questionnaire. Statistical analysis of baseline data supports construct validity by providing strong evidence of convergent and discriminant properties. Our original psychometric validation paper can be found here: Feeling Loved: A Novel Brief Self-Report Health Measure